At a banquet at the Heian court in 1008, according to the usual accounts of a lady-in-waiting's diary, a courtier and poet named Fujiwara no Kintō joined the women's company and asked, in effect, whether Little Murasaki happened to be present. Little Murasaki is a girl in a story. The woman he was addressing had written it, and she had by then begun to be called after her own heroine. We know of the question because she wrote it down herself.
The diarist reflects, drily, that nobody from the tale lived at that court, and the moment passes. More than a thousand years later it is still doing public work. It is the earliest recorded confirmation that The Tale of Genji existed. The entry belongs to the first day of the eleventh month by the court's calendar, and Japan keeps the date: 1 November, the day before these words appear, is a national Classics Day. A committee formed for the book's thousandth anniversary declared it in 2008, and, as the Japanese sources record, in 2012 the Diet made it law. Nobody is given the morning off. I find this moving and faintly comic in about equal parts. A state has legislated a birthday for a joke told at a party about a novel, which is more than most governments manage for the books of their own decade.
The question underneath the commemoration is the one this month's feature asks: why is a book from the year 1008 not simply old? We say that a book has aged, as though it were a face, and the metaphor deserves more suspicion than it gets. A book does not wrinkle. What it loses, when it loses anything, is readers, and readers leave for reasons that have little to do with the calendar. I shall call three books as witnesses. The first is Genji itself. The second is The Nine Cloud Dream, the seventeenth-century Korean novel by Kim Man-jung, which has been available in English since 1922 and in a handsome Penguin Classics edition, translated by Heinz Insu Fenkl, since 2019. The third is Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, a witness from Hampshire whom a Scotsman calls only under protest. From the three I draw three reasons, and I give them in the order in which they occurred to me.
The first reason is that the human condition repeats, and the old books are its longest-running log. That sounds like a sentiment for the inside of a greetings card until one looks at what the two Eastern books are actually about. Genji spends its larger part on the conquests of a radiant prince. As I read the later chapters, it then turns and follows an ageing man through the death of the woman he loved best, and through the household that is left when its centre has gone. The tale does not console him. It lets him understand, too late and in perfect detail, what he had, and I know few modern novels that do the arithmetic of regret more exactly.
The Korean novel makes a related point from the other side. Its hero begins as a young monk on Lotus Peak, distracted on a bridge by eight fairy maidens. As a punishment he is reborn as a man who becomes a general, a statesman and the husband of eight wives and concubines. He is given everything that a gentleman of the age could want. Then he wakes, and the whole career turns out to have been a dream. Tradition holds that Kim Man-jung wrote the book during one of his exiles to amuse his mother, and the account is believed rather than proved. Whatever the truth, its author had risen high at court and been sent away from it more than once. The novel's gentle verdict on ambition is not an Eastern curiosity. It is the report of someone who has watched a career go up and come down, and anyone who has seen a colleague carry a cardboard box out of an office will recognise the voice.
The condition repeats, and so a report from the last occasion remains good evidence for this one. The authors of these books had no idea that they were writing classics. They were trying to get a feeling down accurately, for a particular audience, at a particular court or in a particular place of banishment, and accuracy turns out to be a slow-ageing quality. Fashion goes off within a decade. A correct account of what it is like to lose someone, or to arrive at the top of a ladder and look around, has no sell-by date. A reader meeting such a moment for the first time will find few more reliable guides than people who met it a thousand years before.
The second reason is economy. A book that lasts for centuries has to survive being copied by hand, and a scribe's patience is a severe editor. By 1021 a young woman who would write the Sarashina Diary had acquired a complete copy of Genji and set the event down in her own memoir. That suggests the tale was passing from hand to hand within thirteen years of that banquet. Books that travel in this way must repay the labour of the copying. Economy does not mean brevity. Genji runs to fifty-four chapters and a cast usually counted in the hundreds. It means that very little of it sits idle.
The poems show the principle at its smallest. The tale contains more than seven hundred of them, many in the thirty-one-syllable tanka form, and in the world of the book an affair could be advanced or ended on a single one. According to the exhibition that Bryn Mawr College has devoted to the tale, courtship in that society was a matter of chosen words, calligraphy, the quality of the paper, scent and music, all brought to bear on a few lines. The society was slow, but its decisive messages were short.
The Korean novel is economical in a different way, by architecture. The Penguin edition runs to 288 pages, introduction and notes included. In that space it takes a man from a bridge to a general's tent, a statesman's table and a household of eight women, and then takes the whole of it back. The dream is the economy. It allows the author to state a complete life and cancel it in a single night, and it makes the cancellation do the arguing.
The English witness needs only one sentence. Pride and Prejudice opens on what it calls 'a truth universally acknowledged', and before the sentence has finished it has described the marriage market of an entire county and made fun of everyone who believes in it. No footnote is needed to hear the joke, and nobody gets past it without asking who is doing the acknowledging. Two hundred years on, that is the test I apply to the charge that a book is dated: could a reader have cut a word without loss?
I should concede that the classics are a list of survivors, and the books that did not survive are not here to speak for themselves. Many works once admired as warmly as Genji have vanished from the shelves, and I do not claim that age is a certificate of merit. My claim is narrower. What has come down to us has been through the longest editorial process there is, in which each generation of readers has decided, quite informally, what is worth the trouble of carrying forward. An economical sentence leaves its reader something to do, and a reader given something to do tends to come back.
The third reason is that the strangeness is doing useful work. The customs in these books belong to worlds that no longer exist. In Genji, as I understand the courtship manners, a lady might speak from behind a screen, her handwriting was read as her character, and the morning-after poem was expected promptly, so that a late one was itself a message. We do not send dawn poems. We do check whether a message has been read, and then lie awake over the fact that it was read at eleven and not answered. The costume differs and the pulse is the same. Because the costume is unfamiliar, though, the pulse is easier to see. Nobody mistakes the feeling for a habit of his own.
There is a practical gain in this that a new novel about a familiar feeling cannot offer. A contemporary book about waiting for a message lets me agree with it, which is pleasant and over quickly. A book in which the waiting is conducted through a sheet of scented paper and a screen of bamboo makes me notice what I had never thought to examine, which is slower and lasts longer. Agreement confirms what I already think. Noticing is the thing I came to a book for, and distance is its cheapest source.
The Korean book rewards the same attention. A modern reader meets a gentleman with eight wives and concubines and is entitled to raise an eyebrow, and the institution is certainly dated. What interests me is where the novel puts its attention. As one review of the Penguin edition has it, the women of the household come to love one another instead of competing. The last movement of the book persuades the man that none of what he gathered was ever properly his. The household is of its time. The verdict on appetite is not.
The only part of a classic that visibly ages is its dress, and the dress is replaced on schedule. Genji reached English readers in 1882 in a partial and poor version. Arthur Waley's celebrated volumes followed between 1925 and 1933, then the first complete translation, by Edward Seidensticker, in 1976, and after that the versions of Royall Tyler in 2001 and Dennis Washburn in 2015. Each generation has asked for an English of its own, and the tale has stayed where it was. A translation dates as a coat dates, and the person inside is left alone. I keep two of them on my own shelf, and reading them side by side shows where the decisions were made, which is a pleasure that no single version can give.
This is the best answer I know to anyone who supposes that a book written in 1008 must be out of touch. A classic has nothing left to date, because its world went first. It admitted its distance at the door, and it has been free ever since to talk about what does not change.
Kintō's question has had a long wait for a plain answer. The tale does not hide in a library, as an old book is supposed to do. It stands on the shelf behind me in two translations, one of them broken-backed at the chapters of mourning, and it has not aged in either. Is Little Murasaki present? She is, and she has been, and she has simply been waiting, as classics do, for somebody to ask.
Recommended Resources
☞ English Edition: The Nine Cloud Dream, Kim Man-jung (translated by Heinz Insu Fenkl), Amazon
☞ Purchase (Korean Edition): Guunmong (구운몽), Kim Man-jung, Aladin Bookstore
'Ex Oriente, Lux.'
— James L. Fleming, Edinburgh
※ Published under the author's editorial persona. See the About page for how this comes to be.
Sources
- Kyoto City, proposal document on the establishment of Classics Day (in Japanese), city.kyoto.lg.jp.
- Bryn Mawr College, The Tale of Genji from Princesses to Pop (digital exhibition, poetry section).
- Literature Translation Institute of Korea, Library: record for Guunmong by Kim Man-jung (year of writing and English translations), ltikorea.or.kr.
- Wikipedia, The Tale of Genji (composition, the Sarashina Diary reference and the English translations).